The story of Darial Gorge

Its name means “Gate of the Alans”: Darial comes from the Persian Dar-i Alān, after the people who held the lands north of the pass in the first centuries AD. You are in a gorge carved by the Terek River at the eastern foot of Mount Kazbek, on the border between Georgia and Russia. It runs for about 13 kilometres, and in places its steep granite walls rise as high as 1,800 metres.

For centuries this was one of only two crossings of the Caucasus range, the other being the Derbent Pass, so it has been fortified since at least 150 BC. Romans and Persians both guarded it, and the defences were known as the Iberian Gates or the Caucasian Gates. In Greco-Roman imagination it marked the boundary between the known world and the lands of barbarians.

Control passed among many powers: the Sassanids in 252–253, the Western Turkic Kaganate in 628, the Rashidun Caliphate in 644, and afterwards the Kingdom of Georgia.